Introduction by CSWS Director and Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law Michelle McKinley, School of Law
In 2019, I experienced the loss of my 94-year-old father, whom I cared for in my home for nearly a decade. Although my father lived a long life and died at home surrounded by his children and grandchildren, his death invoked in me a profound sense of loss and grief. Anecdotal and scholarly evidence show that women are dropping out of the workforce to care for aging parents, shouldering much of the responsibility for elder care that is de facto distributed along gendered lines. Throughout my father’s care, I was conscious of my own subject position as daughter, mother, and immigrant who grew up with the cultural expectation that I would care for my parents as they aged. This cultural obligation leeches into broader issues of gender and ethnic identity, as many involved in the home health care industry are underpaid, work long hours, and hail from economically and politically marginalized communities.
In 2019-20, CSWS launched the theme of “Gender, Power, and Grief” for our Lorwin Lectures and other speaker events. On a daily basis, we bear witness to the state-sponsored violence that renders the loss of certain lives and communities unworthy of grief. Immigrant communities are terrorized and families torn apart or imprisoned for exercising their basic human rights. Our speakers and programming sought to both honor the process of grief and the cultural practices of bereavement. They show us that in a time when much of the state apparatus is structured to demean poor people, loving, honoring, and grieving those bodies—and acknowledging what we have lost—is a radical emotional act.
Through our events and conversations at the Center, we hold space for ourselves to grieve, organize, celebrate, and acknowledge that together we are much stronger than we are apart. We have always defied odds, broken barriers, and ignited the change we wish to see in this world. We have to because no one else will ever do it. And if we don’t act together to demand that change, we leave no legacy, nor even an inhabitable planet for our children.
In this spirit of reflection and action, we asked members of our community to share their thoughts on the four Lorwin Lectures held last year.
Rhaisa Williams, “Screaming to Dream: Toni Morrison, Emmett Till, and Black Maternal Grief”
Reflection by Jessica T. Brown
My understanding of Emmett Till’s murder was like most—his death was unjust, primal, and indicative of America’s biggest embarrassment: racism.
Regrettably, my relationship with Toni Morrison’s writing is minimal. I was excited to learn more about her work, at my first CSWS lecture, from the perspective of Rhaisa Williams, assistant professor of theater and performance studies in the performing arts department at Washington University in St. Louis.
Williams’ October 25, 2020, lecture, “Screaming to Dream: Toni Morrison, Emmett Till, and Black Maternal Grief,” explored the short life and death of Emmett Till through Morrison’s first of two theatrical performances she ever wrote, Dreaming Emmett.
Williams began the lecture by sharing her research and how she found herself hunting down relics of Morrison’s play. You, like most, may not have heard of this story. Williams went to grave lengths—even as far as locating the only living document of the play’s performance—to excavate the hidden history of Morrison’s play. After its first production, Morrison reportedly destroyed all recordings of the play and copies of the script.
Listening to Williams was like being a member of Morrison’s audience. It felt ironic, yet fitting, to have this conversation in Gerlinger Hall, as the formal room set the scene for a stage.
The play began by introducing a 23-year-old Till, bold and brave to combat the men and women who killed him. As we listen to Till’s bravado, we feel the immense weight of his mother’s grief, symbolic of grief inherent to black motherhood, offspring, or othermothering.
Throughout the play, Till toys with his mother’s grief, uncaring of how his actions and words affect her. The audience is in limbo and left to wonder if everything he says is accurate, warped by emotion or production of someone else’s stories.
“Entangled between screams and dreams,” Till berates his murderers and reenacts his murder for his mother until an audience or cast member, Tamara, makes him stop.
The play is a thematic telling of Till’s death, but it’s also a reframing of feminism and white fragility.
In between wiping away tears, and scribbling notes that don’t make sense to me now—like “who I am and how the world sees me” and “a dissection of blackness based on culture”—I think of my brother.
My brother, like many other black boys, could be Till. I see this within what Morrisson expresses in the character’s masks and dreamlike dramatics. Till’s story is the reality of being black in America. Times may be different now, but are they? Were they different for Trayvon Martin?
William’s lecture reminded me of my role in the continuous fight against the unjust deaths of black people—brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. I dearly look forward to reading more of her and Morrison’s writing.
—Jessica T. Brown, managing editor of digital and editorial content, School of Journalism and Communication
Sylvanna Falcón, “Finding ‘light born in darkness’: The Urgency of Feminist Activism in These Times”
Reflection by Kristin Elizabeth Yarris
On February 6, 2020, Dr. Sylvanna Falcón gave a lecture titled “Finding ‘light born in darkness’: The Urgency of Feminist Activism in these Times” at the Knight Library Browsing Room.
Falcón opened her talk by sharing that the phrase “light is born in darkness” comes from Brazilian singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, whose songs offered a rallying theme for activists at the 2003 World Social Forum. For Falcón, the “light born in darkness” can be found in various instances of transnational feminist activism that contest the “power over” of states and corporate interests. Throughout her talk, Falcón pushed us to ask hard questions about the role of gender, race, power, and privilege in our transnational solidarity work.
The first case Falcón drew upon in the talk was her research into the history of gender rights activists within United Nations spaces. Falcón focused on two women activists from Brazil and the Dominican Republic who inserted themselves into the male-dominant space of the first UN Conference, held in San Francisco, CA, in 1954. Falcón used the story of these women’s dissent to remind her audience of the urgency of “power from below,” arguing that the mere presence of feminist activists in the halls of power can be a form of resistance.
Falcón next turned to the stories of Berta Cáceres and Maxima Acuña, activists from Honduras and Peru who were awarded the Goldman Prize for Environmental Justice (in 2015 and 2016, respectively). Arguing that transnational feminists must “heed indigenous women’s activism and ways of knowing,” Falcón presented images and video clips to demonstrate the power of Cáceres and Acuña to mobilize their communities against corporate interests and extractive industries.
Cáceres’s death in 2016 casts a shadow over current environmental and human rights movements across the Americas and beyond. Nonetheless, Falcón showed how Berta’s legacy of lucha (struggle) lives on, inspiring the work of Acuña and other defenders of human and planetary rights. In one emotional quote shared by Falcón, Cáceres passionately states, “Si no temenos alegria y esperanza . . . estamos muertos en vida” (“If we don’t have hope and happiness, we are dead in life.”). This line also characterizes Falcón’s career, which serves as a model of publicly engaged and socially relevant scholarship. At the end of her talk, Falcón exhorted her audience not to “succumb to defeat” in our work on behalf of social justice as academics and activists.
Falcón is associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of the acclaimed book Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations (2016), which was awarded the 2016 Gloria Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Falcón also hosts a weekly radio program at UCSC called Voces Críticas (Critical Voices), which invites scholars to share their work with broader public audiences, under the condition that (according to Falcón), “no academic jargon is allowed!”
—Kristin Elizabeth Yarris, associate professor and director of the global health program, Global Studies
Tina Campt, “The New Black Gaze”
Reflection by Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov
On February 17, 2020, Tina Campt delivered her talk “The New Black Gaze” to a standing-room-only audience in the Ford Lecture Hall at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA). Campt is Owen F. Walker professor of humanities and professor of modern culture and media at Brown University. Her talk centered on her new book Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus (forthcoming). Both the talk and the book’s title capture Campt’s new black feminist conceptual approach to black visual culture.
Her book pays homage to Harriet Jacobs, the enslaved woman who hid in her grandmother’s crawlspace for seven years as she waited to make her escape to freedom. Jacob’s choice to anticipate freedom in the confines of the dark enclosure she occupied epitomizes the interstitial space many dispossessed people inhabit and find sanctuary—and where they practice fugitive and “furtive forms of freedom.” Campt asks, what does it mean to inhabit this uncomfortable, transitory space as though it were permanent? And how do we as scholars attune ourselves to these practices?
The Black Gaze critiques the power dynamics of pleasurable, consumptive looking. Instead, viewers become witnesses, and this creates complex, contradictory forms of intimacy. These artworks, Campt explained, “demand complex forms of labor.” Listening as an alternative mode of critique from the white gaze becomes apparent in Campt’s beautifully rendered readings of black women’s artworks that harness the power of opacity—“black women’s refusal to use words to explain our complex inferiority.”
In her reading of Simone Leigh’s art installation Loophole of Retreat, Campt discussed the sonic installation in Leigh’s work, which honors Debbie Sims Africa, who, imprisoned while eight months pregnant, secretly gave birth to her son in her cell. Debbie took three days to be with him before he was discovered. The installation captures the quotidian sounds—the “sonic wall of protection”—that the other inmates made to mask the sounds of the baby, distract the guards, and enable Sims Africa’s furtive, momentary loophole with her son. Thus, discussing her own disorienting aural encounter with Leigh’s sonic instillation, Campt notes that a loophole—normally considered a way out—becomes a sanctuary, a refuge. Campt described the inmates’ aural distractions and other “discursive . . . black feminist noise” as “powerful choral enactments of feminist care and futurity.”
The Black Gaze means being able to shift our perspective to align with the experiences of black precarity, whether or not this is our experience. It is attuning ourselves to these registers of fugitivity and practices of freedom. It allows us to empathize, to be implicated and to be accountable. To witness.
—Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov, PhD graduate student, Comparative Literature
Karla Holloway, “From Fact to Fiction: A Colored Life in Letters”
Reflection by Jalen Thompson
Powerfully delivered in two parts, Karla Holloway’s March 4, 2020, lecture in the JSMA Ford Lecture Hall, “From Fact to Fiction: A Colored Life in Letters” revealed how language produces the imagery around color and, in doing so, uncovers the black body.
The section titled “On Composition” was a reflection on how American literature is embedded in race, yet rejects any association with it, falling into the “peculiar grammars” of color. Color, as Holloway would have it, haunts America. This haunting is seen in the way whiteness is revealed through encounters with darkness in literature constantly “playing in the dark.” Conversely, Black literature names its colors to explore the complexities of racial identity and, more specifically, what “blackness” means to American culture.
Holloway’s concerns with haunting were extended to the idea of place in the “American house” in the latter half of the talk titled “On Residence.” As enslavement is embedded in our cultural memory, Holloway explains how the language of flesh, which is particularly a black feminist practice, offers us a way to attend to our flesh, to love in the flesh. In this example of language theory versus language praxis, Holloway shows us how we come to undo the hiding of our colors with the practice of naming them through the flesh.
In reflecting on the lecture during a pandemic, I am taken to a moment at the end of Holloway’s talk. It was advice she received from her mother on navigating the world as a black woman, which was to “wear it loosely.” This advice has sat with me deeply and here I offer my reflection on its meaning. Since America is embedded with “peculiar grammars” about race—namely the language that attempts to hide racial difference or the power that is given to whiteness—to wear the categories of, for example, “black” and “woman” loosely means to define yourself by your own standards of what it means to be a black woman and not to let those antiblack and antiwoman American grammars attached to those categories define who you are and what you can be. Put another way, the practice of “wearing it loosely” goes against the predetermined narratives about identity to map out space for one to see themselves as themselves in their own flesh.
As I write this reflection, the recent surge of deaths of unarmed black people, mainly black men, in the COVID-19 era has led to a rallying call to address (and attack) systems of antiblack oppression. Yet, the historical and ongoing violence against black women, black trans, and gender nonconforming people do not get the same outrage. Often, I struggle to understand what it means to be a black queer man in a society that prioritizes stories of black men over other black people. If I “wear it loosely,” then I am allowed to see I do not have to attune to the narratives that place power in black male dominance. Instead, I am moved to consider how my blackness is expansive and multiple while centering and learning from the voices of black women, black trans, and gender nonconforming people.
—Jalen Thompson, PhD graduate student, English